IBM chips into EnterpriseDB love fund

OSBC IBM is putting some of its financial muscle behind the business trying to rival Sun Microsystems' MySQL, pushing PostgreSQL.

The systems giant and a trio of VCs have pledged $10m in the latest round of funding for EnterpriseDB. That brings the start-up's total funding to $37.5m.

The size of IBM's commitment has not been revealed, so it's not clear how much IBM loves EnterpriseDB, which was forced to axe a number of sales staff earlier this year. Under the companies' existing partnership, though, EnterpriseDB for Linux has been put on z-series and p-series systems.

The latest funding, due to be announced at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, California, today, comes as EntepriseDB takes its latest steps towards increasing its appeal against MySQL, the Web 2.0 run-away success purchased by IBM rival Sun to increase is systems' sales.

Features due to be announced today see a further focus on capabilities intended to gain uptake among those building online services and working with open frameworks and scripting. EnterpriseDB's database products now feature Developer QuickStarts for Rails, JBoss' Seam and REST, Drupal, MediaWiki, phpBB and PHPWiki, which the company claimed would help get the database up and running in 15 minutes. The company has promised more QuickStarts for Web 2.0 applications and developer frameworks.

Enterprise is also taking two steps to encourage use of its database in open source business applications, serving business intelligence, data warehousing and OLAP. The company's GridSQL architecture, announced last August for Advancer Server, has been released under GPLv2 for both databases. GridSQL enables parallel loads and queries, and provides monitoring across different nodes.

GridSQL also comes with a "license exception" that will allow the architecture to be embedded with any other piece of software using an OSI-approved license. GridSQL will adopt the terms and conditions of that particular OSI license, so the host software does not become subject to GPLv2 terms and conditions.

Chief executive Andy Astor told Reg Dev that EnterpriseDB had wanted to make it easy to adopt the database. "We don't want the license to be a barrier to their adoption," he said.

Also announced is a re-branding. EnterpriseDB Postgres, the pre-configured and certified version of Postgres that launched just seven months ago, is now called Postgres Plus, while EnterpriseDB Advanced Server - which was designed to steal business from Oracle - has been re-branded Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

What's in the name change? Astor said the change signifies the fact both databases now use the same project stream and share the same certification process. This will apparently narrow the time gap between release of Plus and Advanced Server. Previously, Advance Server had lagged by up to six months.®